Pages

Monday, November 25, 2013

Near Death Experience: It's All a Dream, Say Researchers by Chad Stambaugh

Near Death Experience: It's All a Dream, Say Researchers

Since the mid-1970s researchers from the
medical, psychological and scientific fields have rigorously investigated the
near-death-experience (NDE) phenomenon. While most researchers accept that
NDEs are a real phenomenon, there's a lack of consensus on what causes this
sensation, whether it be biological, psychological or even spiritual.

Recent research by the Out-of-Body
Experience (OOBE) Research Center in Los Angeles, USA, managed to replicate the
events that people encounter in a near-death-experience during the rapid
eye movement (REM) stage of sleep. According to the center leader Michael
Raduga, the study
suggests that NDEs “may be just the result of spontaneous and hyper-realistic lucid
dreams, induced by narcosis or brain damage during dying.”

What is a Near-Death
Experience?

Near-death experiences involve a person's
consciousness seemingly leaving their body and entering what appears to
be a spiritual realm. Common experiences involve a person moving down a
tunnel towards a great light, where a spiritual figure or deceased loved
ones help them to evaluate their lives and conclude that it's not yet their
time to die and that they should return to their body. Many people have
also reported an out-of-body experience where they have viewed their own body
from above as others try to resuscitate them or even visited their living
relatives. A feeling of peace and happiness is also commonly reported
during NDEs Not all near-death-experiences are
associated with peace, comfort and happiness. A number of NDE accounts
involve people traversing barren and ugly expanses, nightmarish landscapes and
hellish environments. In this scenery people have reported encountering
twisted and grotesque human and animals figures, zombie-like beings and
lifeless or threatening apparitions, which instead of engaging in
conversation threaten the person, scream or remain dead silent.

The International Association for
Near Death Studies (IANDS) currently manages a database with around 800
reported NDEs. 75 percent of these near-death experiences occurred at the
moment of real or anticipated death. The remaining 25 percent of NDEs
were reported by people who did not perceive themselves to be near death,
but instead where in emotionally intense situations, praying or meditating,
sleeping, or in ordinary states of consciousness when this phenomenon occurred.
NDEs have been reported by people from all demographics, regardless of age,
marital status, occupation, personality and education.

NDE and REM-Sleep

In the US around 8 million people have
reported experiencing NDEs and in most cases they've occurred during
anesthesia-induced sleep. The OOBE Research Center recruited several dozen NDE
practitioners as well as three groups of 10-20 participants from the US
and Russia, who used a method of “cycling indirect techniques” to reproduce the
NDE experience quickly and effectively.

These techniques involved sleeping for 6
hours, getting up and reading through researcher's instructions and then going
back to bed for another 2–4 hours. Upon awakening participants would try
not to move or open their eyes, and instead attempt to separate from their
body. Different techniques to help in the separation included participants
imagining that they were rotating along their head-to-toe axis; swimming; or
visualizing wriggling their hands and feet without physically doing so.

The researchers aimed to reproduce the
tunnel experience due to it being a commonly reported element in the NDE
sensation. Around 20 volunteers were partially or fully successful in
reproducing flight through a tunnel and the sensation of being out of
their body during the REM stage of sleep, which takes place 90-100
minutes after falling asleep and when the majority of dreaming occurs.

Researchers found that NDEs were
influenced by lucid dreaming – where the dreamer, realizing that they're
asleep, can manipulate and control certain elements of the dream.
Participants were instructed that if they successfully separated from
their body they should try to find a tunnel. As they moved down the tunnel
they concentrated on what awaited them at the end, whether it is
a deceased family member, a friend, an angel, or even God. Many of these
20 volunteers reported an encounter with individuals at the end of the
tunnel, including interactions with their deceased grandparents, husband,
pet cat, female angels and even Roman legionaries.

The researchers,
assuming that NDEs take place during REM-sleep, suggest that
near-death-experiences may be manipulated by peoples' expectations of what
they believe or often heard they will encounter at the moment of death.
In regards to people experiencing NDEs at death, only to be revived later,
researchers have stated that there's a possibility that REM-sleep may
continue on after the first few seconds of death, as brain activity does
not stop the very moment breathing has ceased.

This isn't the first study that's
suggested that REM-sleep maybe associated with near-death experiences.
Neurologist Kevin Nelson from the University of Kentucky has argued that
consciousness cannot exist outside of the body and that the NDE sensation
is all in the head. Nelson suggests that NDEs occur when the dorsolateral
prefrontal region – a part of our brain that is usually only active when
awake - becomes active during REM-sleep, resulting in vivid realistic dreams.

Nelson also suggests that other common
elements in NDE accounts, such as the feeling of bliss and lack of pain,
can be explained by a drop in blood pressure during a near-death event.
The experience of moving down a tunnel towards a bright light is similar
to retinal ischemia, a 5-to-8 second phenomenon that is commonly
experienced in fainting.

·REM intrusions, where characteristics from REM-sleep stage - such
as rapid eye movement, low muscle tone and dreaming - occur when someone
is awake and conscious.

·memories of birth, such as moving through what appears to be a
dark tunnel towards a great light;

·And even proof of life-after-death.

History of Near-Death
Experiences

The earliest record of near-death
experiences was in Plato's “Myth of Er” which was written around 420BCE and was
included in Book X of The Republic. The story involved a man named
Er who died in battle with his follow soldiers and returned to life 12
days later, while his non-decomposed body lay on a funeral pyre. Er
retold his experience of travelling to a spiritual realm where souls of
the departed were judged on their actions on Earth, met and conversed
with souls from heaven and even had the option of reincarnation.

Personal experiences of NDEs were first
described in 1892 by geologist Albert von St. Gallan Heim who published a
collection of observations of mountain climbers who had fallen in the
Alps, soldiers wounded in battle, workers who had fallen from scaffolds
and other people who had nearly died in accidents and drowning’s.

The term 'Near-Death Experiences' was
first used in 1975 by Raymond Moody in his book Life After Life
which sparked new interest and research on the topic. Moody also listed
elements that tend to appear in NDE experiences, which include:

·a border of limit, which from NDE accounts have taken the form of
a body of water, a gray mist, a door, a fence or even just a line

·returning to ones' body

Near-Death Experiences across
Cultures

Surveys conducted in the US, Australia and
Germany suggest that 4-15 percent of people have had a near-death
experience. One estimate suggests that NDEs occur in up to 50 percent of
near-death situations.

So far most studies investigating NDEs have
focused on white Anglo-European populations where common events include
the sensation of travelling through a tunnel towards a great light and
life-review where events from a person's life flash before their eyes.
These occurrences maybe culture specific as they are less commonly
reported, and in some cases not reported at all, in NDEs from non-western
cultures e.g. Chinese, Indian, Thai, Native American, Chamorro (native
people of Guam), Mapuche (indigenous people of Chile), Tibetan and Australian Aborigines.

Religion has also influenced some of the
contents of NDE accounts. In Western NDEs a commonly reported occurrence
is that a person is sent back into their body by a spiritual figure,
sometimes reported as being an angel, Jesus or God. NDEs reported in
China, India, Tibet and Thailand have a more Buddhist and Hindu influence,
with some reports involving Yamadoots, who are Hindu Messengers of Death,
escorting the person to Yamaraj, the Hindu God of Death.

In India the event is often recalled as
being far more bureaucratic than the Western experience, where the
spiritual figure simply tell the person that it's not yet their time to
die. In a review of 64 Indian NDEs, a common element to their
near-death-experience was that they were often escorted to an office, where a clerk, would consult some records and inform that them that there
had been a mistake, that it was not yet their time to die and that they
should return to their body. In some accounts the role of the clerk is
replaced by the God of Death himself, Yamaraj.